I am shocked, shocked to find that casual racism is going on in the British tabloid press

Equally shocked to find the Com-Post (Wellington's newspaper of note) reprinting made-up stuff without noticing the bullshit or the crappy writing.

In other news, by tradition French pastry chefs whose cakes fail are traditionally bound to traditionally impale themselves on a traditional baguette.

There is no pineapple

Few people know that French artist Arman...


... had a day job as a curator at the Grant Museum of Zoology.

Newspaper headline's nails it!

This headline cannot be improved upon. Imagine the horror of being stunned by a giant white snail. Your mind reeling from misfortune of stumbling onto a Ken Russell movie scant days before his death. Your dissapointment at not seeing Amanda Donohoe sauntering out from behind a tree in very little clothing. AND THEN A GIANT WHITE SNAIL STUNS YOU!!!

Here it is cunningly disguised as white chocolate which all New Zild hikers, or tramping persons (or lost as they are most commonly known) carry. Of course your average kiwi tramper when chancing upon a giant block of Milky Bar chocolate would immediately suspect that a) something was up and b) it was a commercial being filmed.
Thus the attempted stunning by the savagely transformed snail/chocolate would be unsuccessful due to the Kiwis being on their cellphones to their agents and therefore being protected by the invisible force field which protects that man on the bus who has arguments with his spouse via mobilephone on the way into work on the bus."I don't know what kind of dog it is. A brown dog, how the f.... etc etc etc"
However lettuce (snail food) not be accused of currying or even oreganuming for favour note that this is not a Powelliphanta augusta which are deuced uncommon in December anyway (having moved to Maine) but neither is it 
a locomotive
he said knowingly.

Eloi, eloi, Lemme see botany

Teh Leek Orchid, Prasophyllum colensoi.

Of course the over-the-top garishness of the leek orchid might be too much for people of a fastidious disposition. Fortunately the Onion orchid Microtis unifolia is not so showy.

Run around in the radiation, Run around in the acid rain

Mailbox, flooded

In the wake of our scholarly coverage of melanin and vertebrate photosynthesis, the Riddled mailbag has been flooded with letters about melanistic fungi that photosynthesise with gamma rays.* This is not as bad as a literal flood of the mailbox (which only happened once, that time we foolishly did business with the Mail-Order Goldfish of the Month Club) but it is still not a desirable situation. Some replies are in order.

First of all, if a mold (Cryptococcus neoformans) that has adapted to an environment with a high γ-ray flux shows more metabolic activity than a non-adapted mold when exposed to radiation, this could mean that it is using its protective melanin granules to obtain useful energy from the Compton-scattered γ photons, but it could also mean that it is better-adapted to that environment. Another study in the same feckin' paper found that the same mold's growth was also encouraged by ultraviolet, visible and infrared wavelengths. No-one could possibly have predicted that warmth would encourage metabolism.

No, Mr Gruntfuttock of Hoxton, here in the Riddled Research Laboratory we do not think that the presence of C. neoformans as an opportunistic lung infection in immunocompromised patients is a sign of evolution towards a new human species that can thrive in the fallout of the post-apocalyptic future. It sounds like a plot device for a J. G. Ballard story. You could try selling the idea to Zombie Ballard, except he has been stealing my Dildo Akvavit again and is currently passed out in the staffroom freezer, covered by the frozen peas and the tray of chops that AK won in last Wednesday's meat raffle at the Old Entomologist.

Nor can we encourage correspondent C. B. Throdwalloper's cunning scheme of growing a symbiotic spacesuit, based on genetic-engineered fungus mycelia, that can wrap around human explorers in hostile environments and protect them from the radiation flux while using the energy to provide the user with oxygen and temperature control. Such suits hybridise with alien life-forms and tear themselves away, leaving the owner to perish miserably. This always happens. It must be a tradition or an old charter or something.

This picture is in fact a still from our cinematic adaption of Philip Dick's Eye in the Sky. E-for-brick is a bistable melanin superconducting switch modeled on one in the Smithsonian. I forget how the monks come into the story (AK wrote that part of the script) but they are certainly not wearing protective fungusuits which they are recharging with the sun's eye-beams so rest assured that no intellectual property has been stolen.

Notice how I have woven in some plot devices from The Third Policeman on account of the similarities between that story and Eye in the Sky. In the foreground, Policeman MacCruiskeen is explaining how it all works by Omnium.

* A single flawed study, hyped energetically by people who cannot always tell the difference between γ- and β-rays.

The Common Copper: Not just a comic character in Edwardian detective novels

Other people have all the colourful butterflies. We have the Common Copper (Lycaena salustius).
Male (notice double veins on all wings):

Female (notice single veins on the fore-wings, and the blue eyespots):

The caterpillars eat Muehlenbeckia complexa a.k.a. pohuehue, a.k.a. mattress vine which is the local member of the buckwheat / dock family... but unlike docks & sorrels & rhubarb it has no oxalic acid in the leaves and is no good at all in salads.

Liberated from its native environment, Muehlenbeckia has turned invasive and even now is swallowing San Francisco beneath its straggly tendrils:

Since 1995 or earlier, it has been a problematic invasive species in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area including Lands End, San Francisco and the Presidio of San Francisco and eradication requires 3–5 years monitoring and maintenance.

These people have a harrowing tale of struggle against the Vine from Hell. They seem to be winning but one thing I learned from Deathworld is that human hatred will only stimulate the plant's psychic defenses and cause it to mutate faster than we can fight it.

San Franciscans, you must learn to integrate with your ecosystem rather than wage war against it. Either that or import some Lycaena salustius caterpillars.

Search term scandal!!!

I'm just saying, people that the reason that Thundera thinks that the standards of this blog are abysmal is that Google misleads people as to our content.

Search Keywords for today:

atalanta fugiens

aids condom spider

blueprints face

drug spiders

human anatomy

jan gossaert -

rhinogrades

thin penis

tribal sex

unique black and white pattern If it were not our tyreless work in tracking down the aids condom spider, lord knows what might have happened to the world population of condom spiders but it gets stuck into such salacious company as drug spiders, thin penis and tribal sex.

By Any Other Name

I am by no means a traditionalist but I felt, from the start, that tigris' idea of adding a "jaunty nautical air " to the RADS "A Midsummer's Night Dream" would not go well. I was also unaware of the part of Benjamin Bunny being in the play but Smut showed me the script that he downlowed onto his Krinkle. Technology eh?
It did get quite political with the whale harpooning section and we usually try to avoid that stuff but having the whale and the whalers join together against the evil Dr. Prospero got over that.

Hah hah, cop that Prospero and Adrian the wicked sprite!
Finally as the play says "All's well that ends well" although there is touch of sadness at the death of First Mate Mr. Hamlet, killed by a rabid penguin.

 Roger the cabin boy and his best friend Eric serenade the lords and ladies who signed up for the 3 hour cruise.
I hope it works out.

We are the children of the sun, and this is our inheritance

You might think from reading science fiction that creating a photosynthetic human subspecies fueled by the energy of Sol Invictus instead of food is no big deal... perhaps following the lead of corals and giant clams, with symbiotic algae in the skin. Gene Wolfe, I'm looking at you.

Mrs Spat will break your nice things

Sadly, our experiments with the Riddled Evolvamat have not been crowned with success so much as dunce-capped with abject failure. Subject #1 (Mrs Spat) did at least turn green but she was not well-pleased and the office fainting couch bore the brunt of her ire.
Subject #2 (Greenish Hugh) turned into a newt (he got better).

Wrong track

It now emerges that we were on the wrong track. Rather than chlorophyll as the photosynthetic pigment, we should have set the Evolvamat controls for the heart of the sun melanin. Apparently melanin can convert photons into metabolic activity. It was published in Medical Hypotheses so it must be true.



We learn that birds harvest the sun's bounty with the melanin in the pecten -- a special organ in their eyeballs.* Humans do it with their skin. So our inspiration all along should have been Tostig Amaral, from the Lévi-Strauss-themed planet of Amazonas Triste:

Two corollaries follow.
1. If humanoids adapted to survival in a hostile environment can disguise their auxiliary solar-absorption surfaces as layers of black clothing, then check any architects you know.

2. With his murderous temperament and his pheromonal exudations, Tostig Amaral fits into the "Parfumiers are all serial killers" profile.

------------------------------------------------

* Our pectens are degenerate.

So much for your vaunted 'Ghost Deer' *

This elephant's head serves beer. YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID.

Sadly the Mouse and Elephant has since closed.

-----------------

* Ghost Deer here:

This idiosyncratic ale combines the 3 things that we are most passionate about: craft beer, art and taxidermy.

It would certainly add to the gaiety of nations if this tradition were to take off in New Zealand, but I shudder to think which parts of the animal would be required to serve Lion Red Draught.

Ken Russell commemoration

All around New Zealand, fans of the cineaste are planning events to mark his demise.
Budgetary limitations meant that Russell had to curtail his original plans for the closing scenes of Lisztomania and only stage them like this:

Here the Pahiatua Extreme Wagner Society are preparing for their reconstruction of Russell's original intentions.